Checklists serve as a valuable tool for ensuring that change initiatives are approached with thoroughness, clarity, and accountability. By systematically preparing, engaging employees, and measuring outcomes, organizations can implement change more effectively and sustainably.
Key Insights
- Begin the change process with clear preparation by understanding the purpose and method behind the change, and by developing both a change plan and a communication plan.
- Involve employees early, recognizing their roles as end users and subject matter experts, and connect the change to their personal and professional goals to enhance buy-in.
- Establish metrics to assess progress, monitor results consistently over time, and use data to adapt strategies as needed during the implementation process.
This lesson is a preview from our Federal Change Management Certificate Program . Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
So for those of you who like checklists, this is a great thing. For those of you who don't use them very much, I still think this is a great thing. Checklists help keep you honest about what you're doing, and they help you make sure that your work is thorough, efficient, and complete.
And so we've organized this for you here. It essentially captures everything we've just been talking about in all four of these modules. In this checklist, we're reminding you to begin at the beginning, which is to prepare.
Make sure you've evaluated the why and the how for yourself to give you direction in your planning, and then also to give you a starting point for how you're going to communicate all of the change that you are implementing. Making sure that you involve employees is a crucial step. You want to start that early because of multiple reasons, partly because many of them are going to be the end users.
Also, because they are subject matter experts in the various roles that you may be changing or even eliminating. Areas where they can provide information for you about training that's going to be needed in order to keep them in a position to do what it is that you have imagined, envisioned for them. Using metrics to measure your success, that comes at the very end.
You do want to make sure you're developing that change plan and the communication plan. And then, as you're doing that and as you're involving your employees, remember the part about connecting the change to their personal goals, their career goals, and how they connect themselves to the organization. When employees feel as though you care about how this affects their lives, they're much more likely to be invested in the change you're asking of them.
And, and this is a crucial point, when they feel that they have a place in the new way of doing things and that they can do something well, that's when you really start to get the buy-in. It can be unsettling in the extreme to have spent any amount of time getting good at something and then having someone tell you that the thing you got good at is either going to change or maybe even go away entirely. So making sure that they understand that there are still ways to plug into the organization to invest and to be valued is a key piece of this process.
Again, you'll establish metrics and then use those metrics to measure your success, and then remember to monitor and adapt. So it's not helpful if you set metrics and then don't measure them, and keep measuring them. We measure more than once because change, again, is a process.
So as we implement change, we set benchmarks at the first time we measure the impact of the change, and then we measure again, and then again, and we keep those measurements in place in order to track that progress and in order to do a course correction if a course correction is needed.
